


Testament Enough

by agrotera



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Found Family, Mutual Pining, Non-binary Reader - Freeform, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 08:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18517705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agrotera/pseuds/agrotera
Summary: Hedwyn and the Reader speak of home, and one of them returns to it.





	Testament Enough

**Author's Note:**

> This is a re-post of a fic I deleted some months ago. I was worried someone in my real life had found my work. I'm still worried! But maybe I also don't care anymore. In any case, I'm sorry for doing that, and I'm sorry if you missed this fic!

The wind that kicks up off the Sea of Solis is hot, damp, and reeks of sulphur. The Blackwagon creeks to a stop. Beyond it is a path, and beyond that, the home of Big Bertrude, the bog-dweller, and her people of the Flagging Hands. The Moontouched Girl raises her head from Jodariel’s lap and blinks.

“Oh, are we there? Is that the sea? I smell it, I do, I had forgotten that smell—“

Jodariel stretches. When the Moontouched Girl does not move, Jodariel pats her awkwardly on the head. Jodariel has taken to calling her Fae, and none of the Reader’s traveling companions dare to argue with her. Fae seems pleased, for her part, and is content to skip along in Jodariel’s shadow so long as the gruff demon continues to braid her hair in the small hours of the morning.

Hedwyn climbs, bleary-eyed, from the crew’s sleeping quarters. When he catches sight of Jodi and the girl, he smiles, then hurries to hide the same, lest Jodi see and feel self-conscious. He finds the Reader lingering by the Blackwagon’s red door—surely the sturdiest thing about the wagon and thus the Reader’s favorite place to suffer its bumps and rattles—and places a tentative hand on their arm.

“Did you sleep?” He asks. His smile mirrors the gentle, considerate touch of his fingers. They are warm through the Reader’s thin cloak. “I only ask because I never heard you climb into your bunk. You spend too few hours there as it is, and the Rites…the Rites don’t help. Often you seem, well—“ He searches for the word. “Weary. After. Should I  worry?”

Though the Reader has known Hedwyn only a brief time, already they feel as if they know him. He has an unusual way about him, an openness, a kindness one so rarely finds in either the Downside _or_ the Commonwealth. His strangeness endears him to the Reader, but also inspires suspicion, gives them pause. Kindness is rare because kindness is dangerous; above or below, it paints a target on one’s back. And a marked man does not last long in the Downside.

So, it is only natural, then, that the Reader wonders how it is this kind man has survived.

A cold wind blows up the Reader’s back. They turn and find Tariq, the Lone Minstrel, standing at their shoulder.

“The next Rites lie within this sea. The Blackwagon cannot get there on its own. The bog-dwellers up the path may be able to help.”

The Reader can do ought else but agree. The Lone Minstrel departs, gone to make arrangements, and the air in the Blackwagon is once again warm and close. Hedwyn watches him go, a wrinkle on his usually smooth brow.

“Strange one, that. But he says he works for Sandalwood, and Sandalwood I trust. So, I trust him, too. Do you?”

A tremor of fear snakes down the Reader’s arm. They turn over Hedwyn’s answer in their mind. Do they trust Tariq? They barely trust Hedwyn, and he has proven himself to be nothing if but trustworthy.

No, the Reader concludes, they do not trust Tariq. But Hedwyn’s hand is still on their arm, and they find they do not mind it, and they worry that if they voice distrust, Hedwyn will remove his hand, will frown, will leave.

The corners of Hedwyn’s eyes crinkle, and he smiles. “I sense your reticence, and I don’t blame you. You haven’t been in the Downside long, and the Lone Minstrel, well…he’s hard to get a read on.”

As if summoned by his title, Tariq knocks once, then peers in through a crack in the Blackwagon’s door. It is his calculated geniality, the Reader decides, that disturbs them. They suspect the Lone Minstrel directs the machinations of a situation they do not yet understand, and the Reader does not like to be kept in the dark. Additionally, they find his hat to be quite silly.

“The bog-dwellers have agreed to outfit the wagon. We need only wait here for the night.”

Hedwyn takes his hand from the Reader’s arm and squeezes Tariq’s shoulder. “A night without the wagon—that we can do. Thank you.”

Tariq nods and closes the door.

Hedwyn leans past the Reader and catches Jodariel’s eye. “Bog-dwellers said they’ll ready the wagon for the sea, but they need to keep it overnight.”

Jodariel nods. She extricates her fingers from the Moontouched Girl’s thick hair and helps her to stand. “We have to pack,” she says.

“Oh, but, well,” Fae chews her bottom lip. Her red eyes grow wide.

“Bring the sticks,” Jodariel says, and the girl’s face lights up.

“Right, right!” She scrambles up the Blackwagon’s wobbly shelves and reaches for the lashed-together ward of sticks she’d hung days earlier from the wagon’s rafters.

Jodariel silently lifts her off the shelves and sets her with a _thump_ back on the floor. She straightens and easily reaches for the ward herself,  unties it, and passes it off to the girl, who only huffs impatiently in response.

Hedwyn heard Jodariel humming, once, her scarred fingers entwined in the wild girl’s hair, but when he picked up her tune and helped her carry it along, she only shot him a scowl. He hasn’t heard her hum since.

The Reader thinks of that story often as they watch Jodariel interact with the girl in her characteristically gruff, silent way. It warms their palms, makes them itch for a quill. There is a tale there, the Reader knows. A tale larger than Jodariel or the girl. They only need to write it and see. Then the Reader might help them tell it.

Hedwyn tugs at the Reader’s cloak. “They’ll take care of the rest. Help me start the fire?”

This near the sea, the air is stifling. The Reader doesn’t know what they need with a fire, but there is Hedwyn’s hand brushing theirs again, and they are suddenly inclined to acquiesce to his request, impractical or no.

They step from the Blackwagon and into the night. Hedwyn leads them to an area of low, dry brush, and together they collect sticks in silence. The Reader fumbles in the dark, does their best to gather what fuel their makeshift family needs, but the moons are dim tonight, and the uneven ground too dark to avoid stumbling over it.

And still, still the Reader’s body aches from the many injuries they’d suffered after their expulsion from the Commonwealth. Though the triumvirate has tended to them as best they can, some of the damage cannot be undone. So, they make poor progress with the firewood, and worry what Hedwyn will say.

When Hedwyn sees their meager collection, he laughs not unkindly. The Reader feels a corresponding tightness in their chest. He does not scold or shame, does not complain of their slow pace and unsteady hands. He only smiles and takes the wood from their arms with a quick and cheery, “Gratiam.” He bids them sit, and while they do, he starts a fire.

The Reader settles gingerly on the ground and turns their face to the stars. Milithe is there, and Ores. The brightest stars in the midnight sky above the Sea of Solis, they seem to reach for one another across the expanse of night, each hand desperate to hold the other.

With the fire now lapping steadily at the dark, Hedwyn settles on the ground beside them. Close, but not so close as to be improprietous. He turns his face to watch the same stars. His shoulders tense.

“What do you see in them, Reader?” The broad planes of his face are brought into sharp relief by the fire’s flickering light. Persistent sunburn scars his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, the tips of his ears. His eyes, well accustomed to squinting into the unforgiving sunlight of the Downside, are lined with fine wrinkles. All this the Reader sees and implores themselves to remember while he stares up at the stars, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

The Reader sifts through their cluttered mind for the proper words, the divinely-inspired order that will surely convince Hedwyn to turn his smile on them. A long moment of silence passes between them.

“Should I tell you what I see?” He glances at the Reader from the corner of his eye and does smile, then. “A way out.”

For a moment, the Reader can take only shallow breaths.

“When I was banished to the Downside, I thought that was it. Thought I’d be here forever. Then we find you, bring you back to life, and you show us something I still can’t hardly believe—the Rites are real. Home—there’s a way back.”

His smile fades. He gives up on the stars and gives instead the Reader his full regard. His eyes are too bright in the firelight, too intent.

“Yet, I have to wonder what there is to go back to. The Commonwealth…I lived there all my life. It was all I knew. And for so long, that was all I wanted—to get back. Still do, sometimes.

“But why long for a home that doesn’t want you, Reader?” He brings his knees to his chest and stares into the flames. “I ask myself that every day, and I’m never closer to finding the answer than I was the day before.”

You hear a crash and curse behind, then the muffled titter of Fae, followed by Rukey’s bark of laughter. Hedwyn nods back at the wagon.

“Here, we make do. And I’m starting to wonder if we can do more than make do.

“Besides,” he clears his throat, “what good’s a home without you?”

He reaches for the Reader’s hand, lays his finger gently over theirs. When the Reader doesn’t pull away, he relaxes his shoulders. His hand is damp. It is not unpleasant.

The Reader realizes with a start that Hedwyn is nervous, and they can’t help but laugh softly to themselves. The Reader yearns to reassure him, but they can’t trust themselves to speak, unsure of the words their tongue will form when their thoughts are all a wild, screeching jumble in their head.

Hedwyn freezes, but the anxiety drains away from him when he sees the Reader’s shoulders shake. With one hand he still holds the Reader’s hand, and with the other he reaches into the breast of his cloak and pulls out the Book of Rites.

His voice a whisper, he asks, “Will you read to me?”

The Reader understands the purpose of the fire, then. They take the Book of Rites from him and lay it in their lap.

“Gladly,” the Reader says. They open to the prologue and begin to speak.

_“You, dear Reader, are an exile of the Downside, such as we, the eight who wrote this Book of Rites. That you possess it, and have capacity to glean its words, is testament enough to your potential.”_

#

 

 

The ascent has nothing on the landing.

Hedwyn stumbles through the gates of the Commonwealth and crashes into the dirt. His fall is only so long as he is tall, and yet it feels as if he’s tumbled from the top of the sky. He raises his head from the sandy street. Around him a crowd is forming, words of breathless wonder on their lips—or words of fear.

He climbs unsteadily to his feet. No one offers him a hand. He begins to wipe at the dirt stains on his once-pristine white raiments. Then, realizing the futility of trying, he lets his hands fall limp at his sides, and looks up.

The faces that greet him are unlike his own. They are clean, for one, unburned by the sun, white-eyed with fear, and he is only filthy, only tired, afraid of nothing anymore except being alone.

The Commonwealth. That’s where he is, isn’t he? He should be happy, or relieved, and yet… He blinks. He recognizes so little of it.

The Eight did not lie. They bested the Tempers, the Nightwings and he, and completed the Liberation Rite. And the moment their opponents’ pyre was extinguished, he felt the Scribes’ hands at his back. They gave him only a moment to speak his piece, then carried him into the sky.

And then he was here, chewing dirt on the Commonwealth’s streets, nursing two skinned palms and a guilt so deep it cut a yawning chasm through him.

He had promised them, hadn’t he? That they’d all leave Downside together? That no one would be left behind? That they’d find a way to liberate the Reader, too, no matter the cost?

And the Reader had made a liar of him; had anointed him, after he had told them not to, and then they’d had the nerve to win.

Hedwyn thinks of all of this as the crowd swells. They grow bold in their numbers, begin to shout, to demand his name, his crime, how it is that he returned and now walks free. Few among them even shout names he knows—Dalbert, Tamitha, Bertrude—and many more he doesn’t. Has he met their loved ones, their friends? Are they well? They ask him these questions and more. They are too many to answer.

A guard parts the crowd and kneels reverently before Hedwyn. Her armor screeches in protest of her supplication. “Anointed one,” she breathes. “You who have returned from below. What is your name?”

If he had had a name in the time before when he called the Commonwealth his home, he no longer remembers it. So long he has been beyond the city’s walls, has been in Downside, that any name he might have carried with him to his sentencing has lost all meaning, has rotted into the dust of memory.

But he has the name that Downside gave him.

“Those who know me well know me as Hedwyn the Deserter.” He whispers the words.

The guard stares up at him, her brown eyes so round.

She makes him nervous. Guards—he used to be like them. _That_ he remembers. Patrolling the Bloodborder, sneaking off in the night to…to… seek the comfort of a Harp. Fikani. _Yes_. That was whom he had so longed to see. Wasn’t it? Why, then, do his thoughts bend toward the Reader?

He hears the Reader’s voice in his ear, soft and backed by the hiss and crackle of a fire. He feels the warmth of their hand beneath his own. He sees their wry smile, their uneven teeth, their dirty but fastidiously mended robes.

He recalls how the Reader had hugged him hard, just the once, right before the Scribes had swept him away, and how he had fallen into the Commonwealth with the Reader’s tears still damp on his breast of his raiments.

Fikani he recalls little of, only that he loved her and lost her when he gained the Downside. But he wants to remember. He craves the purpose that remembering might give him. Yet every time he tries to conjure her face, he sees the Reader’s instead.

The guard stands and places a stiff-gloved hand on his shoulder. “Come,” she says at last. The wonder of his return, the impossibility of it, colors her voice, makes her words thick. “Those on the Mount are anxious to speak with you.”

Then she leads him through the city’s streets. Everywhere they go, people stare. “Hedwyn the Deserter,” they say. “He’s come home.”

And he knows it is a lie, for there is no Reader here. He’s left his home behind.


End file.
